


eight seconds left in overtime

by ilgaksu



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Canon Backstory, Canon-Typical Ableism, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 06:33:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7563934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katelyn tells him that her friends bet her a six-pack that she wouldn't talk to him. She’s there in her cheerleader skirt and he says, “Well, now you have.” </p>
<p>He tells himself he doesn’t notice how the skirt cuts across her thighs. The feeling in his chest, he tells himself, is not disappointment. </p>
<p>“Yeah,” she says, and bites her lip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eight seconds left in overtime

Let's take this one from the top: Aaron tries to break the bathroom door down on the very first day, and every day after that. It becomes routine, the crash of his knuckles a way of marking time when time feels a stretched and endless desert. On the third day, he starts calling Andrew everything he can, his own voice hoarse against the cramps. 

"You're a fucking psycho," he snarls through the door. "You're fucking sick."

Outside the door, he hears Andrew yawn. He hears it as though it’s in his own skull. 

"Tell me something new," Andrew says.

*

The first time Aaron sees Katelyn, she’s tripping her way down a staircase carefully, cautious in a pair of platform Mary Janes. He’s hiding from his family and she’s heading to her car. She’s tall as it is, and the added height glazes her into an Amazon, the last statue standing in a ruined city, makes her into Venus birthed from a seashell, all some lonely man’s imagination and blue paint he couldn’t afford. Aaron has been taking Art History as an elective for two months now, because he was told it was easy. Katelyn, with her mouth and her eyes and the maddening fucking swing of her hips - Katelyn is not easy. 

She passes him on the steps, her mouth bright with wine lipstick. Aaron wants to drink from her. He breathes in the smell of her body, the powder of dry shampoo and drying sweat, and looks at the dark circles under her eyes, trying to parse them like phases of the moon. She sees him staring and she smiles.

Usually, girls are frightened of boys like him. He says it in plural because he is in plural. Take away the smile and the cigarettes, and he’s a carbon copy of the campus psycho. He knows what her friends probably say, even though she’s walking alone. He likes to imagine her with friends, he decides. She is the sort of person that should be surrounded with friends like a field of sunflowers. Katelyn's smile is nervous and it rips into him. He feels it tear something important. He watches her slip her keys between her fingers as she walks to the far edge of the carpark in the mounting dusk, and swallows hard. 

It’s not love at first sight. She just knocks the breath out of him. 

Later that night, he locks himself into the shower and locks the image of her into his mind. He imagines what he could do to her and he imagines her asking him to. He turns the water up loud and mouths her name instead of saying it. Aaron never asked for her name. He found it out a few hours later, spotting her in a photo in a glass cabinet on his way out of practice and dropping his eyes to her photograph smile fast as he could, a blink ahead of Andrew's eyes. 

After all, he’s not stupid, and neither is his brother. 

*

On the fifth day, he changes approach.

"Why didn't you just kill me? That wouldn't be something new." 

He hears Andrew turn the page of a magazine slowly, the scrape of the paper.  Noises are accelerated right now; it’s a side-effect of the withdrawal. Everything is a side effect. 

"Dying is boring," he says, his voice scornful. Aaron throws a can of tuna at the door, right at the height where he imagines Andrew’s head is. He told Andrew that he’d ruined Aaron’s life on the second day because he knows Andrew can’t forget shit. He’d said  _ I wish one of us had never been born. _

_ Good, _ he thinks, remembering it now, and the thought is a snarl.  _ I want you to remember this. I want you to remember me. _ Blood is thicker than water, but that’s always quoted wrong: in the desert, you’d die without water. Aaron is in a desert. 

"And what's this?" Aaron asks him through the door. He hears the turn of another page and grits his teeth. His hands are shaking, but he gropes for another can.  

"This," Andrew says, "This is living."

He gets up suddenly and Aaron can hear the creak of the stairs. He throws the can at the door anyway. 

*

This is how the childhood stories go: once upon a time, a boy called Aaron always wanted a brother. Once upon a time, Aaron wasted stars and birthday candles on this one stupid ache. 

An ache is a thing caused by lack of. An ache is a yearning for something that feels both out of reach and desperately, painfully close, so much so you could pull something in your shoulder stretching for it. An ache is a bruise is blood under the skin.

An ache is the right word.

*

Katelyn’s Mary Janes are discarded on her bedroom floor. She lives in a single, and Aaron looks at them, half-awake from the bed, and wonders where she keeps her lipstick. His own mouth is messy with it, secondhand, transference, and he wipes the worst of it off with the back of his hand. He sees the note on the bedside table, tucked in amidst the mess of earrings and bangles. She’s headed to practice. She’ll be back. Her Post-It notes are purple and she’s drawn a smiley face and a heart. He smiles and then catches himself doing it when his phone buzzes on the floor. Aaron sees a text from Andrew when he digs through his jeans pockets to find it. 

It’s succinct. Andrew always is.

_ Where are you?  _

His stomach a knot, he texts back _  don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to _ , switches the phone off, and this is his first mistake of the day. Then he goes back to sleep. 

That’s his second.  

*

Katelyn tells him that her friends bet her a six-pack that she wouldn't talk to him. She’s there in her cheerleader skirt and he says, “Well, now you have.” He tells himself he doesn’t notice how the skirt cuts across her thighs. The feeling in his chest, he tells himself, is not disappointment. 

“Yeah,” she says, and bites her lip. 

He gets his racquet and his books together and stands up to head back to the Tower. She steps in his way. When he tilts up to look at her, she blocks out the sunlight.

“They promised me another if I asked you out,” she says, and tosses her hair over her shoulder. There’s a stammer in her voice that he didn’t expect. 

“Is this a prank?” he asks, in his imitation of Andrew’s best worst voice.  It’s a good mimicry; he is, after all, Andrew’s simulacrum. She rocks back with the wither of it. She looks scared. “I’m not laughing.” 

He’s not. Her fear lows something in him. 

“Neither am I,” she says, and he frowns at the stammer again. It sounds a lot like sincerity, but good things don’t happen to boys who look like him.

“If you say yes,” she adds, “That’s a six-pack each.” 

“I can do the math,”  he snaps, and she frowns in turn now. “I can even count up my quarters and get one myself.” 

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you how to turn a girl down nicely?” she retorts, both hands on her hips. There’s a interlocking layer of friendship bracelets on her right wrist and a faded stamp from a shit club near the campus on the back of her hand. Today, the mixture of lipstick and hurt makes her mouth look like a bruise. 

Briefly, Aaron thinks of Tilda and almost laughs. 

“My mother,” he replies, “didn’t teach me much.” 

Except how to use the fucking colour wheel, he thinks. Except how to cancel out. Except how to buy concealer at the drugstore in the right shade to hide it all skin-deep.   Katelyn spins on her heel to walk away. 

“Tell me why,” he demands. He tries to demand. It comes out as something else. She raises her eyebrows at him. 

“Say yes,” she challenges, “And you’ll find out.”

In the end, he tells himself he’s not scared of some pig’s blood shit. He tells himself it can’t hurt. Can’t, not won’t. 

You’d think he’d know better by now.

*

"We have a deal," Andrew snaps, and grabs Aaron's shoulder, digs his fingers in. "We have a promise."

Aaron closes his eyes for a second. He opens them again. 

"Like I can forget," Aaron says. "You're not the only one who remembers." 

*

When Aaron finds out about Neil, he laughs in Andrew’s face for a straight minute, which - apart from him - is the only straight thing on the fucking team, apparently. Andrew looks beyond him and to the clock on the wall. Aaron can nearly hear him counting the seconds. They are so close they breathe the same breath, which they always have, even when they didn’t know it. Aaron wonders which one was born first, whether it was him, whether he escaped only to be followed by his brother. It seems fitting. Andrew’s pupils are pinpricks in the sunlight, and Aaron laughs, and then:

“You fucking hypocrite,” Aaron says, almost calmly, almost as if his hands aren’t shaking with it, like they haven’t in forever, after years of living as clean as he can get, “With all your talk of pretty faces. Although, I mean, I guess _pretty_ faces aren’t _your_ sort of -” 

He watches Andrew’s eyes flare. And here it is. Another thing that can’t be undone. Their speciality. Their shared resemblance. Andrew throws himself at Aaron, and Aaron thinks about letting him hit him, feels himself eclipsed under the weight of Andrew’s shadow, and wrenches himself away just in time. 

*

Sex with Katelyn makes him want to get high right after, because when he’s high nothing can fucking touch him, never has and never will, but when he’s inside her he’s wrecked. It’s like she’s cracked his ribs open with her bare hands and he’s saying _thank you, anything, please, can I -_

“You’re only nice when you want me,” she laughs once, and he bites the inside of her thigh, leans up to catch her wrist and presses it back against the bed. He says, “What, you think I can turn it off?” 

“Maybe you’re just easy,” she smirks, and it strikes him like a compliment. Easy is not a word many apply to the Minyards. It hums under his skin for days, like a mark but better. 

After all, Katelyn doesn’t leave marks, not after the one time Nicky comments whilst they’re changing out, on the red lines bisecting his shoulders in short, angry bursts from her acrylic nails, blossoming like a spiderweb of veins. It stings. They suit her, that to fit against the angles of his shoulders her hands leave more. Katelyn’s majoring in Math. Aaron calculates the cost based on the weight of Andrew’s eyes on his bare skin. 

_My brother,_ he explains, those two words heavy in his mouth, his head in her lap.  _My brother._ The head is the heaviest part of the human body; by this logic, she is holding him up. She presses one fingertip to his lips.

"I hate having to think about this," he admits, when she pulls her hand away.  Katelyn is an only child. Her only sisters are the ones she chose from her team. Every other day, he envies her.

"So don't think," she whispers. 

*

A secret: Aaron doesn’t hate Andrew. He loves him, but the weight of that love is a fucking yoke, it’s a bloody and terrible thing. The weight of that love is its own pound of flesh. It’s an Exy racquet, a skull, a man dead on the floor. 

*

_ Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six, _ someone once told him. That’s twice the chance of getting fucked to him, but then again, he’s not the one who’s good at math. 

*

_ You make me want to be good, _ he tells Katelyn, and immediately blames his orgasm for loosening his tongue, but if it was it’d be easier to look at her. 

_ You are good, _ she says. He traces the faint marks on her shoulder from his stubble, and tries to look at her breasts and not his own hands. He sees blood in the crevices of his own fingers for a second, and then blinks and just sees the flush of her skin. 

_ Tell that to my jury.  _

_ You’re good to me, _ she says, kisses the corner of his jaw on her way to the shower, and he wants to be better, he wants to be better, he wants to be - 

*

He keeps on with nightmares of killing that bastard, even if he’s not sorry, maybe because he’s not sorry, maybe because he’s only sorry he hadn’t taken his head clean off. Brotherhood is a blood pact; only Aaron can make wounds in Andrew. 

He wakes from them in his own bed in the dorm and feels Andrew wake nearby in the dark, knows it in his bones because they are of the same bones, lies there in the suffocating night and listens to the sound of Andrew’s breathing sharpen and settle. 

He has them and wakes in Katelyn’s bed and tells her not to touch him and she doesn’t. He tells her no because his skin always feels so thin in these long seconds that he worries her touch could make him bleed. He should never have let her lean in that first time. He should never have let himself sway under her, like under the blow of a racquet, like the breaking of a hand twisted too far back. He should have known where this would lead, with someone bleeding out on the floor, because love is a chemical bond that leads, like all unstable things, to an explosion. He should never - 

He should never have listened into that fucking phone call. Curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity took the cat and cut her throat. Curiosity took the cat and turned the wheel the wrong way. 

*

The first time he meets Andrew, he remembers blinking, disbelieving, at this shadow-who-was-not-a-shadow. 

“What’s your name?” Aaron asks, out of awkwardness and needing to say something. The plastic chair he sits in is uncomfortable, but Andrew sprawls like he’s been living in this weird liminal office for six months. Maybe he has. Aaron doesn’t know. 

“They already told you, didn’t they,” Andrew huffs, and turns to look out the window. His sleeves are long and his eyes are dark in the early morning. 

“Tell me again,” Aaron says. 

“Your name’s Aaron.” Andrew’s mouth, eerie and familiar, twists. “Alliteration. That’s cute. Give us something better to talk about, Aaron.” 

“The fuck if I know,” Aaron says, “This is deeply fucking weird,” and Andrew doesn’t turn back, but his shoulders loosen a fraction. 

“Yeah,” he says, “It is.” 

“Is that why you don’t want to look at me?” Aaron asks, noticing how Andrew’s eyes stay glued on that window. “Andrew?” 

His mouth tilts up now. 

“Maybe.”

They sit in silence until the social worker comes to get them. That part isn't uncomfortable.  

*

Andrew makes Katelyn cry, and this is the cost of Aaron getting what he wants. Andrew sells out cheaper than expected, but then what else did Aaron expect? Andrew, underneath all the black, turns out to be as cheap - as human, as bleeding - as the rest of them. His taste - like in food, and music, and means to an end - is bad, but he only shares blood with Andrew, their twinship not extending to Aaron having to be proud of Andrew’s choices. 

He wipes the smeared mascara from below Katelyn’s eyes with a damp paper towel, dragging her into the women’s bathroom and glaring at the other girls so they get the fuck out. 

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she sniffles, as he tilts her jaw so her face better hits the light. The tear stains cannot hide her, and he tells himself his hands are only shaking out of habit. She is luminescent, and he is very careful, until all the mascara is gone. 

“Did he hurt you?” he asks instead, and with the inward catch of her breath her lip trembles. She shakes her head. “You can say if he hurt you.” 

“He didn’t,” she replies, but Aaron knows all about about wounds that don’t leave bruises, about how fear sits under the skin. That’s something his mother taught him. 

“I’ll go,” Aaron mutters finally, incompletely, at a loss. Andrew always wins. “It’s okay. I’ll just -”

“No,” she says, her hand gripping his wrist so tight he winces. She lets go, but pins him with her eyes. “No. You’re not going anywhere.” 

“You can say,” he repeats a final time, helpless and joyous and hating. He never knew he had the depths to oscillate so wildly before this, this dumb moment in the women’s bathroom of his shitty college. 

“That’s what people like your brother do, sometimes,” she tells him, a little bitter, “But they only do it when they’ve lost,” and she kisses him with a sudden grim victory.  

It isn’t that Neil makes Andrew human, Aaron knows. He’s a Minyard. Of course he knows. It’s that seeing your reflection in someone else’s eyes - it makes you want to be able to look at yourself, so you can look back at them in turn. Aaron doesn’t pretend to get it and doesn’t want to, but he doesn’t think this is another way for Andrew to twist barbed wire tighter into his own wrists. 

Because come on, give Aaron a break. He’s got eyes to see what’s left of what’s underneath the armbands, and his jaw still aches from where Neil had hit him - although the less thinking he spends on Neil the better for the both of them, to be honest.  The price of Katelyn is Neil Josten, with his eyes that are always shifting through the room for escape routes; Neil Josten doing whatever the fuck he does with Aaron’s brother, and he doesn’t like it but he’s no stranger to hard bargains. 

“I thought you didn’t like him,” Aaron says, and he means _I thought you didn’t trust him_. Andrew looks at him silent and slow before answering, and Aaron realises that’s changed. He wonders when it did, what slow-reaching madness leeched through Andrew’s blood to make the shift.

Aaron knows Andrew isn't crazy. 

“I don’t,” Andrew retorts, pushes away from the counter, and heads towards the door. 

“Is this living, then?” Aaron calls after him. He means it as a challenge. It sounds like a question. Andrew freezes at the door, and Aaron knows that for a moment, they’re both back on either side of that bathroom door, and Aaron thinks maybe they always will be. Their voices carry through it, though, and Andrew never forgets. 

Andrew’s mouth twists. Aaron knows this whilst facing his back, whilst Andrew is facing away. He knows this without looking. And once upon a time, a boy called Aaron always wanted a brother. The weight of brotherhood sits on his chest like a vice, the weight of his secret that forces him into a room every Wednesday to sit with his life lesson in being careful for that you wish for, the weight of one simple bruise of a truth:  

Aaron doesn’t hate Andrew. 

“You’re breathing, aren’t you?” Andrew says shortly, and slams his door on the way out. 

*

Aaron holds his hand just above the phone. He can hear Tilda yammering in the next room, but all the consonants are distorted by the wall. 

He pauses, hinged on the moment of a decision he will find himself inexorably returning to later. 

Blood to blood. It always outs. The future is always calling. 

Aaron picks up the phone. 

 


End file.
